1898, Part 2
Dublin, Haifa, Kigali and Rehoboth
“So we fight an’ die four years for the bloody dame in fancy clothes,” said Dan O’Neill, “and now what do we bloody get for it besides a flag on our graves? I’ll tell you…”
The thirty others at the Flagship pub listened with varying degrees of attention. This was a solid Irish Workers’ Freedom Party neighborhood, and this local – like most of them – had become one long wake for the fallen since the soldiers had returned. Everyone at the tables had heard O’Neill’s speech at least once, and most of them more than that.
“… has bloody Cranbrook changed his mind about home rule? No, all he just says he’ll buy us some land.”
“That’s something, Danny, don’t tell me it isn’t,” said Tim Kelleher, freshly demobbed and still wearing his uniform jacket. Before the war, the British government had offered loans for peasants to purchase land; now, it proposed to buy landlords’ estates and
give them to men who’d served in the war.
“With a preference for bloody officers…”
“And the wounded.”
“Yes, I know, and those who’ve been decorated. I’ve got two wounds myself, and a lung full of chlorine, and mentioned in despatches, so I know I’m not at the end of the line. But they’re still trying to buy off a tenth of us to sell out the rest, and you know damn well that the good land’ll all go to the bourgeois. We need to run the show ourselves, settle our own accounts with the bloody landlords…”
Whatever else O’Neill was going to say was interrupted by a crash of a rock through the local’s window. “Ave Maria, you red bastards!” someone outside shouted as the men in the pub ran to the broken window – which was the worst thing they could have done, because the
next thing that came through it was a bomb.
It wasn’t a very good one, and it rolled under a table before it exploded, but it was enough to to do the job. The explosion ripped through the pub, overturned the table, sent nails and pieces of glass tearing through the air. By the grace of God no one was killed, but nearly everyone bled from multiple wounds, and someone was screaming about his eye.
“You bastards!” O’Neill cried and charged out the door, with others following. Suddenly a bullet crackled down the alley, with another close behind. “Ambush!” he shouted. “Go back in and bar the door!”
There were no guns in the pub, and the men took cover anxiously, waiting for the attack. But it never came, and after half an hour of terror, they judged it was safe to send for a doctor.
“Bloody Proddies…” one of them said, but another answered “I don’t think it was Proddies. Didn’t you hear them? It was Ave Maria – the Legion mob.” Most of the returning Legionnaires were as fervent nationalists as anyone in the Flagship, but they had no time for socialists, and it seemed that they’d decided to make their feelings known.
“We’ll sort them tomorrow,” O’Neill said, and this time there was no disagreement at all.
The marchers moved inexorably down Haifa’s main road, past the shops and importers’ offices. “Election now!” shouted the Brotherhood of Labor, the returning veterans, the Jews and Muslims, the followers of Abacar and those of the Bahá'u'lláh. And Lev Davidovich Bronshtein shouted with them. “Election now!”
The Porte promised an election after the war, and then after the peace treaty – now they’re saying that they’ll hold one when things settle down, Bronshtein reflected.
Well, things won’t
settle down until the election, and it’s about time they learned.
He supposed he didn’t blame them for wanting to wait – not after seeing what had happened elsewhere. France had elected a socialist government and bought itself a civil war; Lord Cranbrook had lost his majority and was hanging on by the skin of his teeth; Wilhelm, who’d thought to be acclaimed Kaiser, now had to haggle with the Reichstag; and nobody knew who would run Austria. Soldiers returning from the war didn’t want to come back to more of the same. They wanted change, so that their sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain – and in the Ottoman Empire’s cities, they wanted not only new parties but a new system.
Bronshtein supposed that he counted among them. He’d only joined the Bedouin scouts and had never been in the trenches, but he’d seen a few fights, and after that a protest march didn’t scare him. And hadn’t the Bahá'u'lláh said that everyone must be free?
“Yes he did,” said Rania beside him, and he realized he’d spoken out loud. Much of her Bedouin tribe had come to the city for the protest, but she marched with
him, not with them, and he felt a stab of pride at the thought. They’d been through the war together and decided three months ago that they would marry; the sheikh had pronounced himself impressed enough with Lev’s performance on the battlefield to agree, although he was no doubt also thinking of the stake the tribe would one day have in the Bronshtein farm. No one would have imagined a generation ago that a Bedouin woman might marry a Jewish man, but under the Bahá'u'lláh’s teachings, surely all things were possible.
There was a knot of policemen at the next intersection and they watched the marchers carefully, but they did no more than that.
Wise move, Lev thought; a good third of the protesters had been in the war, the trade unionists could also handle themselves, and neither would hesitate to fight if the police tried to stop them. It would take more troops than were under arms now in Haifa, and for that matter in all the sanjak, to rout the marchers from the streets.
They’re marching like this in Stamboul today too, and in all the cities of the Balkans, and in Anatolia and the Levant. He’d heard that there would be protests and strikes even in Tripoli and Benghazi.
They want to wait for things to settle down, do they? Let them try to wait us out now.
“Election now!” he shouted, his voice one with thousands of others.
“My grandmother used to tell me that she and my grandfather would lie together like this,” said Paulo the Younger. “On the roof of their house, I mean.”
Mélisande, beside him, rested her head on his chest and let him gather her in. “After they’d done other things?”
“She never talked about that part. Although she did say that my father would wonder what they’d been up to.”
He looked past her toward the parapet of the only building in Kigali where they
could lie like this. All the other roofs in the city were thatched and sloped steeply to shed rain, but the armory was built of stone, and its roof was made for soldiers to stand on and defend. It was a hard bed, but nothing a pile of straw couldn’t cure, and a cool rain had broken the night’s heat.
“Your eyes are far away,” she said. “Where have you come from this time?”
“Samuel’s kingdom and Maniema, and the Bembe clans in the west.”
“For your kings?”
“Yes. And from here I go to Bujumbura.” Once, Paulo had had a home and a district that he’d been sworn to guard, and Mélisande had been a constant wanderer, but things seemed somehow to have reversed. She stayed in Kigali now for three months at a time – from council to council – before roaming the land for the next three, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent more than two weeks in one place. There was a new order to shape in the eastern Congo, and neither the British colonial service nor Tippu Tip would run out of tasks for him soon.
She raised herself on her elbows. “What are they like, the new countries?”
“Variations on the same theme, just as the Great Lakes kingdoms are.”
She looked questioningly at him for a moment. “I
think I know what that means…” He cursed himself silently; it was easy to forget that for all Mélisande’s perception and intelligence, she’d had very little education. Her childhood was unimaginable to him, almost like the stories of his grandfather’s time as a slave. Maybe that was why she reminded him so much of the elder Paulo: visionary, driven to freedom and not happy unless life was a constant jihad.
Of course, Grandfather was much older by the time he had to rule a country, and he’d seen much more of the world. And it still killed him – the British talked him into attacking Dahomey, and he ended up with a bullet in his chest.
He willed himself back to the here and now, and told Mélisande what variations were. They talked about music for a while, and her questions quickly led into the realm of
his ignorance, and the conversation slowly drifted back to where it began.
“All the countries here stand on three legs – herders, farmers and holy men,” he explained. “The difference is in how they relate to each other, and in which way the faith pulls the rest of the country – and in how much the people who had power before are still fighting to get it back.”
She nodded gravely –
this she understood. She still preferred to deal with the people directly, but she’d picked up a few tricks of managing factions, and Paulo had taught her a few more that he’d learned from his father. He wasn’t sure he ought to have done that, because some of the factions might be more willing to become Tippu Tip’s clients than Mélisande was, but he’d done it anyway.
“I’ll be cashiered if they ever find out,” he muttered. “That or worse.”
“For… this?” She spread her hands to take in the two of them where they lay on the straw.
For a moment, he thought of leaving it at that, but he’d long since found that he was incapable of lying to her. “Bad enough I have commissions from both the Sultan and the Queen, with their plans drifting apart. If I have loyalties here too…” He looked up and let the rain fall directly on his face. “I’m afraid I’ll have to choose, and if I have too many masters, I won’t be able to avoid betraying something dear to me.”
“Why have any masters at all?” It really was that simple to her. Power over others, and serving those in power, were the roots of evil in her theology, which explained why she set such harsh restraints on herself. “The purest form of
shura is when there is no ruler to consult the people,” she’d said during one of their conversations. “It is where the people rule and consult each other.” And when she’d said that, he’d heard his grandfather saying
only God can limit freedom…
Maybe it was natural that she would feel that way, given how she’d grown up. But he’d lived closer to power than she had, and he wasn’t as prepared to dismiss it. It was Tippu Tip’s power that kept the rubber barons and mercenaries from making the eastern Congolese into slaves again, and power like that could be worth serving.
“All my masters are in my heart,” he said. “It isn’t easy to let them go.”
Mélisande nodded again. Maybe she was wondering how much of his heart she had, compared to the Sultan and the Queen. But it wasn’t in her nature to ask such things.
“Tell me a story,” she said, and gratefully, he did.
There wasn’t much for a Schutztruppe captain in Rehoboth to do. The Basters and the Boers who’d joined them [1] acknowledged Wilhelm as their king, and they’d made their peace with the settlers in Südwest-Afrika, but they ran their own affairs and conducted their own patrols, and they’d made clear that they didn’t need German troops to help them. They actually didn’t need Germans for much of anything; Germany might be the strongest power in the region, but they felt that their way of life, and certainly their faith, was the superior one. Many of the askaris who’d gone to fight in Europe had fallen in love with the bright lights of Berlin and stayed; the Basters had almost all come home.
So, no, there wasn’t much work for a Schutztruppe captain like Karl Müller – he saluted the Basters’ Kaptein in the morning, rode out with his men to guard against cattle-raiders and report on the condition of the trails, and not much else. He suspected – no, more than suspected – that he’d been put out to pasture; a Herero officer adopted into a German family might be good enough in wartime, but now that there was peace, he was an embarrassment best put where no one would see him. His father had got him the commission, but that had been when Vati was a power in the foreign service; he was no longer that, and Karl doubted that he’d ever be promoted.
It served its purpose, Karl acknowledged. What Vati had done – and Karl might never know how many favors the older man had had to call in to do it – had kept him out of the trenches. He’d spent most of the war in Kazembe and Barotseland, where he hadn’t had to fight anything worse than bandits. Toward the end, when Portugal was no longer a threat, they’d sent him to Kamerun to join the assault on French Congo, but even that paled beside what the soldiers in Europe had faced. He’d survived, and now it was time to move on.
Mutti and Vati aren’t coming back to Africa, so I can always go manage their land. He could be, in all but name, the Bauer Müller, oath-bound to a hundred herders and peasants as well as five German tenants, and could take his father’s seat in the district Bauernkammer and his rotating seat in the colonial legislature. But he’d come to question the justice of that arrangement during the course of his travels, and with Ndapewa doing such a good job as bailiff, he’d be superfluous.
And besides, I might as well admit that I’ve fallen for the bright lights as badly as any askari – I’d rather stay in Rehoboth where they don’t dance and they think the devil brews beer than live on a farm.
Before the war, when he was eighteen, he’d thought of going to the university. He wouldn’t be the only African at Leipzig or Jena, or at the new public college in Berlin; the Germans in Germany were more accepting of that sort of thing than the settlers here.
Maybe twenty-four isn’t too late to start, and it’s about time I saw my parents again.
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[1] See post 932.
[2] See post 1180.